RC2 Breaking Change: Tool Outputs No Longer Broadcast Between GroupChat Agents

[jlahteen]

We have migrated our existing AutoGen app to Agent Framework using the version 1.0.0b260127 (Python). This migration went quite smoothly, and we got the app working on Agent Framework.

However, when we upgraded to RC2 (1.0.0rc2), the functionality of the app did break. After investigations we realized that there is a fundamental change in broadcasting tool outputs in GroupChat. In other words, tool outputs are not broadcasted anymore for downstream agents. This breaking change has been introduced in PR #3712 without any big headlines.

Broadcasting tool outputs to downstream agents would be beneficial in many real world scenarios. For example, if agent A runs a tool with a vast output and then agent B analyses it. Now the only workaround for this is to prompt the agent A to include the tool output in its response causing more token consumption and performance loss.

Please consider making tool output broadcasting a configurable feature in workflows. It could be even configurable per agent or executor.

[moonbox3]

Thanks for posting, @jlahteen. We have been discussing this internally. Including tool outputs in the orchestration patterns has been doing more harm than good as of late, so we're trying to figure out how to best handle it. The problem we're seeing is that when using agents that hit different models (for example the Foundry Agent Service), the model will throw an error when it receives a tool call ID that it did not initiate. The clean_conversation_for_handoff() filtering was added to address that class of failures.

That said, your use case is valid — an agent producing a large tool output that a downstream agent needs to analyze is a reasonable pattern, and forcing the first agent to echo the output as text is wasteful. We're looking at whether this could be made configurable (e.g., per-agent or per-edge), but we need to figure out how to do it without reintroducing the cross-model tool call ID mismatch issues. No timeline on this yet, but it's on our radar.

[moonbox3]

Note: I've turned this into an issue. Please follow along with #4575. We'll update it when we have more details to share.

[jlahteen-te]

@moonbox3 This is terrific news, I'll really appreciate this. Looking forward what you are going to come up with this. Thank you! @jlahteen